Suit seeks $199M from Madoff relatives

NEW YORK, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- A court-appointed trustee has sued four relatives of Bernard Madoff, seeking $199 million the suit said they received as a result of his Ponzi scheme.

All four had held senior positions in Madoff's firm.

The suit, filed Friday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York by Irving H. Picard, names Madoff's brother, Peter Madoff, who was chief compliance officer in the firm; his two sons, Andrew and Mark, who served as co-directors of trading; and his niece, Shana Madoff, who worked as compliance director.

The suit does not accuse the family members of participating in Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

But the suit said they were "completely derelict" in their duties and "as a result, they either failed to detect or failed to stop the fraud, thereby enabling and facilitating the Ponzi scheme."

Madoff's firm, the suit said, was operated "as if it were the family piggy bank," with the family members taking out huge sums of investors' money and using it for homes, cars, boats, vacations, personal business ventures and other expenditures.

Peter Madoff, the suit said, improperly received more than $60 million; Mark Madoff, more than $66 million; Andrew Madoff, nearly $67 million; and Shana Madoff, more than $10.6 million.

"Simply put, if the family members had been doing their jobs -- honestly and faithfully -- the Madoff Ponzi scheme might never have succeeded, or continued for so long," Picard, the court-appointed trustee seeking to recover assets for the victims, said in a detailed statement Friday.

Madoff, the architect of the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history, pleaded guilty to 11 counts of fraud in March. He is serving a 150-year prison sentence.